As ICANN 77 gets underway in Washington DC, the issues of closed generics and IDNs are already causing significant delays to the launch of the next new gTLD application round.



During a day-long "day zero" session yesterday, it was reported that making policy on closed generics will take at least 96 weeks or over 22 months while making policy on IDNs is expected to take until March 2026 at the earliest. This has prompted criticism from some who question why, for example, a "call for volunteers" needs to take as long as three months to carry out.

The predicted closed generics timetable is relatively aggressive compared to previous EPDPs. However, the work itself is about predicting and preemptively shutting down all the ways corporate marketing people might try to obtain a closed generic for competitive or defensive purposes, rather than for the public interest. Whether this is possible remains to be seen.

A draft framework for closed generics has been published over the weekend, which lays out a few dozen principles that should be taken into account in subsequent EPDP work. Created in private by a cross-community group of 14 people from the GNSO and Governmental Advisory Committee, it seems like a decent starting point for a closed generics policy, despite the fact that the work at its core is about anticipating and preventing any attempts by corporations to secure a closed generic for non-public interest reasons.